Featured User Antoine Guèdes

I recently stumbled upon a Myows member with some very cool feedback and I wanted to pick his brain a little and share some of his ideas and insights with the rest of you . I love how regular guys and girls like us are getting together and essentially using the web as a platform to counter the kind of copyright theft and fraud that that same web interconnectedness has allowed for in the first place. Fighting fire with fire!

Antoine Guedès is a gifted illustrator and general web creative. This is the edited version of our conversation (with Antoine’s permission)

Chris: I like your work. Cool stuff!
Antoine: Hey! Thanks, I’m glad you like. I’m working on my new personal site actually… my first Tumblr theme.

Chris: Nice! How’s Belgium? You guys got summer yet?
Antoine: It’s just crazy in Belgium. Last week we had summer time with 24 C° like and this week… It falls to 12 C°, anyway it stays sunny so it’s enough

Chris: Climate change… riding that bike to work. Only problem is it’s raining down here! So Max tells me you do some cool illustration work?
Antoine: Yes, I do. I love doing illustrations.

Antoine: The two alien illustrations are protected with Myows. They’re part of my WordPress theme for alienatwork.be

Chris: Brilliant.
Antoine: And this one too, illustrations I made for Rubbik’s newsletter (a Belgian web agency):

Chris: So would you describe yourself first and foremost as a graphic artist? Web creator?
Antoine: Well, both graphic artist and web creator, so general digital creative would be better. I do design, xhtml/css and illustrations
Antoine: in fact, I’m a student. I’m studying for a bachelor in communication, but I work as freelancer at the same time – it’s my passion, a hobby.

Chris: Ambitious! Well your work is awesome!
Antoine: Thank you :-)

Chris: So how long have you been using Myows for?
Antoine: Mmmmh, well I think since January or February. I subscribed to Myows not long after it was launched. I first read an article about Myows on a blog and I found it interesting because as a graphic artist I really care about my copyrights… and about my customer’s copyrights too. I remember I talked a bit with Max. And he was really cool.

Chris: Yeah – We’ve realised since we started just how little the average creative knows about their rights – there’s a lot of knowledge sharing that needs to happen…
Antoine: Oh! And I uploaded my first work on Myows the 4th of March

Chris: How many OWs have you got saved so far?
Antoine: Seven so far. I’m waiting to finish my new personal website to upload some more. I have a lot of projects to show on my portfolio… and to protect too.

Chris: Well you should be able to upload those in bulk which will help when you start placing loads of material on your site. Also, with the API ready to roll, we’re hoping to get a few useful add-ons to make it even easier to protect files
Antoine: Yes, I think Myows is an awesome idea and I’m sure it’s got a crazy future!

Chris: I hope so. Do you find the process easy / user-friendly on the whole?
Antoine: Yes really! The concept is brilliant and that’s what I love about Myows. I’m sure even those who haven’t heard about their copyrights before will realize it’s importance. Myows really helped me for my personal use and also for a college project about copyright.

Chris: Well that’s what we’re aiming for so I’m glad it’s coming across that way.
Antoine: I saw about the API. I’m hoping to see some awesome stuff in the future. The dropbox things would be really great! Dropbox and Myows have both changed my life, so if the ideas could be merged it would be crazily better. I already spoke about that to a good developer friend

Chris: We’re looking into all sorts of interesting combinations at the moment so we’ll keep you posted!
Antoine: I think Myows could become really important… in Belgium we have a company that takes care of copyright issues in multimedia but it’s not free…

Chris: Well we hope we can provide you guys with the help you need. It’s why we started Myows in the first place – because there was no service to help us protect our own work! So tell me, if there was anything for us to add to Myows to make it even better for you, what would it be?
Antoine: I thought a lot about a payment service if we go over the free available space. I think for cheap cost it could be even interesting, especially for designers or other creatives who have a lot of work to protect or want to host/protect their customer’s work. I also thought about another thing… it would be great if we could creat fields. It’s hard to explain, so let me take an example: I finished a big project for a client, Rubbik for example… I have to protect the mockup, some illustrations, the wordpress theme zip file, and some others stuff. It could be great if I could post all of this in one field

Chris: So almost like creating an extra field for the job title so you could upload a bunch of files all as part of one job?
Antoine: yes, that’s it

Chris: That’s a great recommendation Antoine! We will definitely discuss this at our next Skype meeting on Friday (my meeting with Max and the Dave)
Antoine: I’m glad I could help out

Chris: I also love your idea about hosting customers’ work under your profile… We’ll look into that too!
Tell me about paying accounts, what do you think would be a fair price per extra gig of space? And what additional features would you like to see on a paying account (if any)?
Antoine: nice, happy you like the idea too. Well, I think personally that if a premium account doesn’t exceed 8 Euros per month it would be really cheap… it would suit me. About space, I don’t really know. In Belgium we often pay about 5euros for extra gigs. It’s quite expensive here though. As for additional features, why not suggest the possibility of multiple accounts to manage customers account for example?

Chris: Or perhaps for a company to have multiple users (staff) accessing one account at different levels of access? That all makes sense!
Antoine: oh yes… for a company to manage =)

Chris: Exactly! Well that’s all really helpful, thanks so much for your ideas and your support man! I will definitely bring all of these up for discussion with the rest of our little team. Whatever lands up being in paid accounts, if we launch these one day, you’ll have one for free! We’ll keep you posted!
Antoine: You’re welcome! Thanks for the interview. It’s a great chance to explain myself.

Chris: For sure, thanks for your time and good luck with your future studies and work…
Antoine: Nice, I look forward to see what’s next!